I Still Don't Sleep At Night

IT'S TIME TO PULL THE PLUG

It just gets weirder and weirder and so do I. I spent yesterday on my bugged phone. I finally spoke with a Microsoft technician who said the words I dreaded hearing. There is nothing they can do for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I could just speak to a technician they would tell me some magic technique or refer me to some patch I'd overlooked. But no. I waited on hold for about an hour to be told that other than to do what I'd already done: re-format, re-install and get windows updates and security patches--there was nothing else to be done. Also they couldn't understand how it was happening if I wasn't hooked up to the internet. So again I was left feeling insane.

I called Dell and was on hold for, you know, and got a tech who was honest enough to say it was over his competence level. Either he was honest or just didn't know how to deal with crazy people. He transferred me to software. I was on hold for about an hour and then got disconnected. I gave up on that.

I called the Department of Computer Crime or some such thing in the Illinois State Police. I got reached a nice Officer Taylor who told me the crimes they worked on were of the sexual type to minors--no hacking crimes. But he did know a lot about computers and was willing to listen to my saga. He told me he had only one other case in all his years of computer crime solving where there were hackers and the computer wasn't connected to the internet. He said the man hadn't been out of the house for a year. His family told him that the man wasn't right. Nice, huh? I'm just nuts. I'm imagining that I receive letters and files that I've never seen before, that my desktop wallpaper selections were changed to all stone motif (as in jail walls) selections today, that I can't open the properties of the event viewer on my own computer, that I am allowed to go online but only to read my e-mail--not to go as far as the web, that there are 20 processes running on the task manager including explorer and the only one I'm using is the task manager, that I have no start menu, that I am not allowed to see the computer services, that the password on my main e-mail account has been changed and I don't know it, that there are files and files of code and script which are replaced as quickly as I delete them, that there is a new administrator with a password I don't know, that someone broke in my house and rubbed black ink over my speakers before disabling them and so on. If I am imagining all this I really am tripping.

Well it's neither here nor there. I've decided to take the advice of Officer Taylor, my friend Ellen, who told me I was addicted to the computer but should have added to the hackers as well. And I recently really heard the advice of Dale Favier who was kind enough to send me an e-mail advising me to unplug the computer. He wrote that when I get the craving to "practice calm abiding meditation (a.k.a. shamatha, a.k.a. sitting Zazen)." Dale is a Buddhist who keeps a practice journal online. You can read more of his wisdom here. I thank whatever God it is that looks out for me and that doesn't allow my god to be a computer.

Dale wrote about meeting his own addictions in his journal that it really was "chasing the mouse from one hole to another. It's all anxiety, fear of emptiness, fear of failure." I was able to take my dreadful addiction to the computer and turn it into an addiction to the hackers. Can you believe all the hours I spent playing those war games with them? It's just a computer after all. But it replaced earlier addictions--another hole. The mouse just found a new home.

And my God was I addicted to the computer! There were days I never dressed or went out of the house. Household chores never got done. I wrote about it here. My kids had to contact me by instant message before I got DSL and they could phone while I was online. I took off whole weeks from work because I couldn't bear to leave the computer for a whole day. I forgot to pay my bills. When the hackers came I was so obsessed I forgot to go to work because I didn't know what day it was. I later found out, much to my surprise, that I had also gone into work on my day off. I had no idea what I was doing. It was bad.

This will be hard too: I'm putting I Don't Sleep At Night on hiatus so I don't have an excuse to go seeking out a computer every day or so. Now I can focus on getting a job, as I was just laid off. I need to focus on applying to the school I say I'm starting in January. And I definitely need to work on my own spirituality. I need to follow the advice I gave to the hackers. Funny how we project.

Thanks for reading. I'll miss you more than you'll miss me. See you in a couple of weeks.